About the Exhibition

Your Portrait was one of Tetsumi Kudo’s favorite and most frequently used titles. While the word “you” indicated the person looking at the work, suggesting that we are all constrained by a variety of established values and conventions, it also referred to Kudo himself as the work’s first viewer. Further, it was intended as a portrait of the human race as the unavoidable victim of radioactive contamination.

With images such as eyeballs and noses growing alongside transistors, bloated cerebrums riding in baby carriages, male genitals swimming in aquariums with little fish, and human figures forming cat’s cradles out of chromosomes while meditating in a birdcage, Kudo’s works might seem to be weird or repulsive. Are they perhaps meant to be a depiction of some sort of wretched futuristic hell? No, on the contrary, this was Kudo’s vision of a paradoxical paradise in which, in order to survive, human beings would be forced to live in harmony with nature and technology.

Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990) was born in Osaka, but spent his early childhood in his father’s hometown of Aomori. Following his father’s premature death in 1945, Kudo moved to his mother’s hometown of Okayama, where he stayed until the end of high school. While attending Tokyo University of the Arts, Kudo showed his work in the Yomiuri Indépendants Exhibition, a bastion of postwar avant-garde art, and along with Ushio Shinohara and Shusaku Arakawa, became a prominent representative of the Anti-art generation. Then after being awarded the grand prize in the 2nd International Young Artists Pan-Pacific Exhibition in 1962, Kudo moved to France. With Paris as his base, he spent the next approximately 20 years in Europe, developing a unique realm of expression by fusing a critical view of civilization with scientific thought.

But unlike other Japanese painters who traveled to Paris, Kudo was not interested in studying European art. Instead, he boldly engaged with fundamental problems and taboos related to human survival, including sex, pollution, and atomic energy, and through challenging works that criticized and attacked modern European humanism, and provocative Happenings, he set out to cure Europe’s ills.

In 1969, Kudo briefly returned to Japan to create a massive relief called Monument of Metamorphosis on a cliff face on Mt. Nokogiri (located in Boso, Chiba Prefecture). A solo exhibition at the Kunstverien in Düsseldorf in 1970, and another one at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1972 helped secure his reputation in Europe, and in the mid-’70s, Kudo shifted the focus of his attacks to himself as an artist, displaying a more introspective and autobiographical side in his work.

In the ’80s, Kudo occasionally returned to Japan, and in addition to giving spirited talks, symposiums, and performances, showed series such as The Structure of the Imperial System and Paperboard and developed works in which he examined the foundations of the Japanese social structure. In 1987, Kudo accepted a teaching post at his alma mater of Tokyo University of the Arts, but died prematurely on November 12, 1990 at the age of 55.

After his death, in 1994, a retrospective entitled Tetsumi Kudo: Contestation/ Création was held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and in recent years, Kudo’s work has begun to be reassessed throughout the world. In addition to a solo exhibition at La Maison Rouge in Paris in 2007, a large-scale retrospective was held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2008-09, marking the first full-fledged introduction to Kudo’s entire body of work in the U.S.

In this retrospective, we present a wealth of works, including everything from the artist’s early paintings, a wide range of objects and drawings that incorporate motifs such as birdcages and aquariums to a deck chair that could not be included in the 1994 retrospective, and a highly creative group of works from the mid-’60s that made use of baby carriages. The exhibition also includes photographs of Happenings and Performances, and related documents. Along with nearly all of Kudo’s works from domestic museums, we have borrowed pieces from Western museums and collectors to create a comprehensive survey of Tetsumi Kudo’s over 30-year career, including approximately 200 works that have never been shown in Japan.

The exhibition is a collaborative project between three institutions: The National Museum of Art, Osaka, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Aomori Museum of Art. It is significant that the event will be held in these places, as they represent three important stages in Kudo’s life: Osaka was the city of his birth; Tokyo was his home when he became a standard-bearer of Anti-art; and Aomori was where he spent his impressionable youth.

Hours & Admissions

Location

Art Museum Special Exhibition Gallery

Date

2014.2.4(Tue)-3.30(Sun)

Time

10:00-17:00 (Friday is 10:00-20:00)
*Last admission : 30 minutes before closing

Closed

＊Closed on Mondays (except March 24, 2014)

Admission

Adults: ¥850 (600)
College and university students: ¥450 (250)

*Including the admission fee for Mud and Jelly , MOMAT Collection, From Crafts to Kogei In Commemoration of the 60th Japan Traditional Art Crafts Exhibition and Flowers: From the Museum Collection.
*The price in brackets is for the group of 20 persons or more.
*All prices include tax.
*Free for high school students and under 18.
*Persons with disability and one person accompanying them are admitted free of charge.

Organizer

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo,
The National Museum of Art, Osaka,
Aomori Museum of Art

Cooperation

JAPAN AIRLINES